Conventional Wet Silver Halide Processes
In conventional wet processing of silver halide based color photographic elements, an imagewise exposed element, for example color paper designed to provide color prints, is processed in a large volume of color developer solution. The element is typically immersed in a deep tank of processing solution wherein the volume of solution is much greater than the volume of the element therein immersed and wherein the volume of solution is much greater than the swollen volume of the light sensitive emulsion layers coated upon the photographic element. The developer typically reduces the exposed silver halide of the element to metallic silver and the resulting oxidized color developer reacts with incorporated dye-forming couplers to yield dye images corresponding to the imagewise exposure. Since silver is generally gray and desaturates the pure colors of the dyes, it is desirable to remove it from the dye images. Silver is conventionally separated from the dye images by a process of bleaching the silver to a silver halide and removing the silver halide by using an aqueous solvent, a fixing bath. This fixing bath also removes the undeveloped original silver halide. Commonly, the bleach and fix are combined into one solution, a bleach-fix solution.